


The Night Before Polling Day

by Econofics



Category: Political RPF - UK 20th-21st c.
Genre: Gen, Inspired by A Christmas Carol, Satire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 13:27:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2852450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Econofics/pseuds/Econofics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Hilton is visited by three spirits.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Night Before Polling Day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [subito](https://archiveofourown.org/users/subito/gifts).



> With apologies to Charles Dickens.

Steve Hilton woke to another bright, cloudless, sunny Northern California day. He still hadn’t quite got used to how tightly you had to close the bedroom blinds to prevent the morning light from waking you up at sunrise. But while the lack of rain did turn the grass an unhealthy shade of brown and might be a problem for farmers, the endless sunshine signaled to Steve Hilton a new beginning. 

Gone were the soggy rain-drenched early morning meetings in Whitehall. Gone was the fool's errand of begging and cajoling the Boneite faction of the Conservative Party to enter the 21st century. God, he had such contempt for them. It was almost enough to make him want to join the Greens. They had no concept of what true conservatism was all about. It wasn't about the narrow parochialism of leaving the European Union, which seemed to be the only thing they cared about. It was about freeing people from the suffocating and ambition-numbing embrace of the nanny state, so that they could reach their true potential – as free beings standing on their own two feet.

Now he was in the New World, a nation where even the Democratic president Bill Clinton had said “The era of big government is over”. How refreshing, how invigorating. And here in Silicon Valley among all the self-made millionaires and billionaires, Steve was in his element. So what if their grammar wasn't always up to Oxford standards – they were living proof that the libertarian ideal was real. Here in California, Steve had seen the future, and it worked.

Although Steve's formal appointment at Stanford was with the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, he spent most of his time with his fellow conservatives at the Hoover Institution. He was at the Spogli Institute simply because it had an opening. Steve did not really care much about International Studies (though he liked the fact that the institute had “Freeman” in its name). From Steve's perspective, the threat to freedom was not ISIL and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdad, but the Labour Party and its leader Ed Miliband.

But even here in Arcadia, the fight for freedom was never-ending. With his wife Rachel working day and night at Google, it fell upon Steve to find schools for their two young children. Back in Britain he’d fought hard for free schools that were independent of the state bureaucracy. Here in America, they called them charter schools. Steve smiled quietly at the small PR victory represented by the name “free schools”. “Charter schools” described how the American schools came into being – they were chartered by a school district or other government entity. “Free schools”, however, was pure propaganda – it implied that the other state schools were “unfree schools”. 

But here in Palo Alto, home of the entrepreneurs and innovators who had overturned the old analog economy and brought them into the digital age, there were no charter schools at all. All the state schools were traditional public schools in the American sense of the word. Steve was eventually able to find an excellent independent school for his children, but what of families who lacked his resources? Would their children be doomed to languish in the grip of the state bureaucracy forever, their potential stifled by the plodding orthodoxy of the education monolith? How could it be that here at Stanford, in the very town where Milton Friedman had spent his final years, people didn’t understand that regulation and innovation were fundamentally incompatible? But aside from this hiccup, Steve's life in America was blissful, except that he had bad dreams.

Two nights ago, he had dreamed of Grandfather Hircsák (his Hungarian grandfather whose name his family had anglicized to Hilton). That was weird because Steve hardly ever thought about his grandfather. Weirder still was the fact that the old man was dressed in medieval armor. And weirder yet was what he said.

“Stephan, Stephan,” (his grandfather never called him Steve), “This visitation is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose. Do you remember why our family came to England? Have you forgotten why we fled the Communists? We came to England to save ourselves and to help save the English from themselves. To prevent the birthplace of the Magna Carta from going the way of Communist Hungary. We came to remind the British of what it means to be free. To warn them against the stranglehold of the nanny state. And now with Labour leading in the polls, they need you more than ever. What are you doing here in this sun-drenched land of bimbos and valley girls? Your destiny, and our family's destiny, lies across the Atlantic.”

And finally, “Adieu, adieu! Remember me.”

As Steve was shaving the next morning, he tried to place where he had heard “Adieu, adieu, remember me,” before, but he was in a hurry to get the kids off to school and himself to the office, so he had no time to dwell on it. On the days when he wasn’t teaching at Stanford, Steve was working full time on Crowdpac, the technology start-up he’d created to increase government transparency. His private joke was, “A transparent government is a thin government.”

The next night, Steve had dreamed that he met the Hoover Institute fellow Thomas Sowell. Steve had had several daytime conversations with Sowell, and he was surprised and impressed by how conservative and libertarian this black American was. Steve had assumed that all African-Americans were liberals, especially after the election of Barack Obama. But Sowell had nothing nice to say about Obama or about Obamacare. In fact, he hated it. He was also against affirmative action, gun control, abortion rights, the minimum wage, judicial activism and the Federal Reserve System. 

In his dream, they had a convivial time drinking beer at a Palo Alto facsimile of a pub. But before he left, Sowell told him, “Beware, Steve, the Nanny State is on the march, not only here in the US with Obamacare, but in Britain as well. However bad New Labour was, those days are over for good. The next Government will be less Tony Blair and more Tony Benn.”

Even in the dream Steve thought it was a little strange that Sowell knew who Tony Benn was, but Crowdpac was about to go to open beta and Steve was far too busy to waste time wondering about dreams.

In the evening, after helping to put the children to bed, Steve sat down at his desk to write a press release for Crowdpac. He dozed off in front of his computer but soon woke with a start, sensing another presence in the room. He spun around in his chair to see a female form in a black cloak and hood standing behind him. He could not make out her facial features, and her voice was slightly muffled but quite refined. She said, “I am the Spirit of the Future, I am here to show you things that are yet to come.”

With that, the Spirit whisked them both off to what seemed like a street in London. She pointed to a brown brick building where a short flight of steps led up to solid wooden doors set in a lintel of white marble. Steve was sure that he had seen the building before, but he could not remember where.

“Spirit, what is this place?” The Spirit did not answer but pointed her finger to the mantel over the door. There, some words had been sandblasted away so that only their faint outline remained. From where he stood, Steve could not make out the words, but with a wave of her hand, the Spirit lifted him up so that he could trace out the letters. They spelled “LINDO WING", and Steve remembered where he has seen the name before. This was the entrance to the private hospital obstetrics wing of St. Mary's Hospital. It was the door that the Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William had come out of with their newborn baby. It was the private hospital that the royal family had used for royal births since at least Princess Diana.

“Spirit, what is the meaning of this?”

The Spirit replied, “The private wing of St. Mary's Hospital has been closed to make space for longer hospital stays by workers claiming disabilities. The royal family now has its babies in an NHS hospital like everyone else.” 

“Oh Spirit, how could this happen?” 

“At the last general election, David Cameron and the Conservative Party were defeated by a landslide. The new Labour government decided that the private hospital system was draining funds and talented resources from the NHS. They nationalized all the private hospitals.” 

The Spirit then snapped her fingers and they both appeared at the entrance of a nondescript modern school building in Hammersmith, London. Steve needed no explanation as to what this building was. He had been there himself - it was the West London Free School, the first school founded under the Coalition’s new free schools program.

Seeing the students rushing out at dismissal, Steve instinctively moved away, but the Spirit told him not to worry, and sure enough, the students simply walked through them both. It was an unsettling feeling, but Steve felt worse when he noticed the uniforms that the students were wearing. Gone was the smart blazer with the Roman bust and the Latin motto “Sapere Aude” (Dare to be Wise). Instead the students were wearing hoodies printed with the self-esteem enhancing words “I Am the Best!”

“Oh, Spirit, what happened to the West London Free School?”

“As with the private hospital system, the Labour government determined that free schools were a drain on the resources available for traditional state schools. They brought them all back under local authority control.”

“Oh Spirit, are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of things that may be, only? Assure me that I may yet change this future you have shown me by an altered life!” 

With that, the Spirit lifted her hood, revealing first the expertly coiffed blond hair and then the quintessentially English face of Margret Thatcher. She said, “Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important, although difficult, is the highroad to pride, self-esteem, and personal satisfaction.”

And with that, she vanished.

Steve awoke with the bright light of morning streaming through the windows and a terrible crick in his neck from the way he’d slept bent over his keyboard. He immediately started up his internet browser and to his relief he found that David Cameron was still Prime Minister. He googled the West London Free School, and it was still there. He googled the latest polling data, and Labour were ahead by 10 points.

The next thing he did was go to Expedia and buy a plane ticket home.


End file.
